The Latin Lexicon (nicknamed Numen) is an online Latin dictionary (a dictionary of the Latin Language) and Latin grammar tool based on An Elementary Latin Dictionary (by Charlton T. Lewis). This online dictionary is different from any other you've ever used. It has been built from the ground up using AJAX technology to allow the fastest, most efficient and most useful user interface. Oh, and it includes macrons!

This Blogger site is just a holding place for our news!

To access the Latin dictionary, click this link:

Friday, May 22, 2015

This site is actually hosted on a cloud service called Amazon EC2. EC2 changes now and again. As they buy new and faster hardware (computers) they tend to decommission the older ones and makes the top tier the new middle tier, and in effect marking down the prices. In addition to this regular upgrade cycle, competitors like Google Compute Engine and Microsoft Azure lower prices to stay competitive and EC2 has to follow suit.

It's because of these upgrade and competition cycles that prices and server specs tend to fluctuate. Since this site has been using the same configuration for about a year now, I decided to check if there's newer, faster, cheaper hardware.

It turns out there is. I was basically able to double the power of the site's hardware. EC2 is great because all it takes is 3 clicks to make the change. The site was down for about 2 minutes all together. So if you noticed an outage, that's probably why.

The upshot of this upgrade is that the site should run noticeably faster and handle noticeably more users. As a matter of fact, usage tends to increase about 30% percent year-over-year. In fact, this has been a great year because the gain has been 34% overall. Check out the image below.

34% year-over-year usage increase

Notice the blip on May 13th and 14th. That's when I accidentally bombed the server. Ooops. Despite that, there was still a 34% gain in usage.

Overall, this is good news. The site is getting more and more popular and hopefully more and more useful. Also, it's getting faster. Thanks for reading and using it. If you have friends who are taking Latin or are interested in Latin, make sure to tell them about Numen.

Thursday, May 14, 2015

Sorry about the server outage. It was a technical mistake on my part -- don't worry, Numen isn't going way. Thanks for all the compliments -- the number of people emailing me really did let me know that Numen is a useful and necessary tool. Please continue to report problems! It really helps me out!